If you had, you would have realised that the other tech companies often pay these manufacturers more money to be spent on improving work conditions, whereas Apple chooses to squeeze them for every dirty brown penny, which inevitably leads to cuts in worker pay and conditions.
If you'd read the article you would also know that whilst Apple has a very pretty code of conduct for their suppliers, it is common for them to simply ignore infractions of that code of conduct, with fewer than 15 suppliers terminated for non-compliance since 2007, even though there are scores of the most serious breaches of that code of conduct recorded every year.
Apple does a lot of talking about worker safety, but they don't do a whole lot of walking.
I'm not suggesting that he does care, only that the animosity people feel towards Gates is ridiculous, particularly when you consider that he is one of the world's most prolific philanthropists.
Many men would move to Bali and sip cocktails or buy islands or build statues of themselves, but Gates has dedicated himself to doing what he can for those who need help the most. Fuck petty patent wars and crappy consumer electronics with a 12 month obsolescence cycle - Bill Gates is doing work that really matters. And damn it if I'm not jealous of him for that.
Bill Gates could literally cure cancer, eradicate AIDS and make Malaria piss itself and people would still be giving him grief about Windows, IE6 or ripping off Apple.
In that CS101 class he intends to go from no programming knowledge to building a rudimentary search engine - that's not weighty enough for you?
And in his other course he is going to teach the algorithms and techniques used in Google's self driving car.
I'm not quite sure what you think an ambitious effort would consist of.
The superiority of the ML class has been talked about a lot, but I hope that Thrun and co. have taken those criticisms on board and improved their methodology.
I have one and the only time it mentions Stanford is in the disclaimer
Disclaimer: This online offering of Introduction to Artificial Intelligence does not affirm that you were enrolled as a
Stanford student in any way; it does not confer a Stanford grade; it does not confer Stanford credit; and it does not
confer a Stanford degree or a certificate.
Stanford is not worried about those certificates. If it were worried in any way, it would prevent the use of it's materials or syllabi being used in the production of the courses and it wouldn't help to promote them.
His signature on a certificate for a course that has absolutely no controls is about as useless a piece of paper as I can imagine...except for possibly Microsoft Developer certifications.
He was already carrying out research for Google, so I imagine in a lot of ways, Stanford was his side project. Then this opportunity came along and he traded Stanford in for the opportunity to do something really big.
Don't they require you to attend an actual exam or to submit a significant piece of written work?
Neither of those methods of assessment can be accomplished over the internet for free. That is the biggest obstacle these free courses face if they wish to become a major part of the educational landscape.
Standard practice is to provide the audio of the video with an additional track providing any information that is not described within the original narration. Add in a full transcript to cover the deaf, ensure your site can be navigated by screen readers and you're golden.
This has nothing to do with Sebastian Thrun. He had nothing to do with this batch of courses. Both schemes emerged from Stanford and launched alongside one another (presumably to maximise publicity), but they are not related.
There have been suggestions (from, most notably, Professor Jeffrey Ullman) that Stanford got spanked by disability advocates who complained that the courses were not accessible to the visually impaired and that the development team was working to get this fixed before launch; hence the delay.
As for certificates - it has always been made very clear that there would be no certification or credit of any kind, issued by Stanford for these courses or for the courses run by Sebastian Thrun's outfit. For there to be contention, there needs to be some area of disagreement - there is none.
But again, you assume for some reason that schools will do a better job of teaching programming than they do with everything else, when in fact, they are more likely to screw it up because the teachers can't program themselves.
In UK Secondary education, only 35% of IT teachers are specialists. So over half of the teachers are as clueless as the kids they are teaching. What could possibly go wrong?
Teaching a subject badly makes kids hate something.
Why do you think that they will do a better job of teaching programming than they do with Maths, Science, English etc?
Do we want a generation of kids to grow up despising programming and programmers? Look at what the education system does to English Literature, Maths and Science.
Kids grow up loathing Shakespeare because it isn't taught in the same context that it was written for. Kids grow up to hate maths because they've been force fed the mundane basics since they were 5. Do we honestly think they'll do a better job with programming?
I'm all for a more thorough coverage of Comp Sci and ICT - of which programming is obviously a part, but it should be weighted to play to the strengths and interests of the individual students. Some students will take to programming, others to graphics and animation, but as soon as you start making stuff compulsory, you find yourself forced to water down the content and you end up sucking the joy out of it.
Those of us with Comp Sci university backgrounds will probably remember how miserable those students who didn't 'get' programming were. Do we really want to do that to kids?
I actually think that the way the lecture videos were presented in the AI Class were superior to most conventional lectures. They were broken up in bitesize chunks of 2-10 minutes each, which meant that as soon as you started to lose focus, you just walk away, whether that be after 15 minutes or 2 hours. Also, if you found a topic confusing you could stop moving forward, read up on the topic yourself or consult your fellow students on the discussion boards (which were incredible) until you were happy with it, then continue on. And of course, you can watch them repeatedly.
Sure, there are shortcomings, but I think they more than held their own.
Slashdot Mirror
You're comparing 60 hour weeks to inadequate ventilation in Aluminium workshops?
Don't tell me, for your next trick you're going to compare running with scissors to drinking bleach?
Did you read the NYT article?
You didn't? I'm shocked.
If you had, you would have realised that the other tech companies often pay these manufacturers more money to be spent on improving work conditions, whereas Apple chooses to squeeze them for every dirty brown penny, which inevitably leads to cuts in worker pay and conditions.
If you'd read the article you would also know that whilst Apple has a very pretty code of conduct for their suppliers, it is common for them to simply ignore infractions of that code of conduct, with fewer than 15 suppliers terminated for non-compliance since 2007, even though there are scores of the most serious breaches of that code of conduct recorded every year.
Apple does a lot of talking about worker safety, but they don't do a whole lot of walking.
You're just pissed because you didn't think of doing it.
I'm suing you.
The eye-roll elicited by your post has done irreparable damage to my optic nerve. You'll be hearing from my lawyers.
I'm not suggesting that he does care, only that the animosity people feel towards Gates is ridiculous, particularly when you consider that he is one of the world's most prolific philanthropists.
Many men would move to Bali and sip cocktails or buy islands or build statues of themselves, but Gates has dedicated himself to doing what he can for those who need help the most. Fuck petty patent wars and crappy consumer electronics with a 12 month obsolescence cycle - Bill Gates is doing work that really matters. And damn it if I'm not jealous of him for that.
He has given a lot more than $750m to charity and that kind of generosity can pay for an awful lot of forgiveness.
Bill Gates could literally cure cancer, eradicate AIDS and make Malaria piss itself and people would still be giving him grief about Windows, IE6 or ripping off Apple.
In that CS101 class he intends to go from no programming knowledge to building a rudimentary search engine - that's not weighty enough for you?
And in his other course he is going to teach the algorithms and techniques used in Google's self driving car.
I'm not quite sure what you think an ambitious effort would consist of.
The superiority of the ML class has been talked about a lot, but I hope that Thrun and co. have taken those criticisms on board and improved their methodology.
I have one and the only time it mentions Stanford is in the disclaimer
Disclaimer: This online offering of Introduction to Artificial Intelligence does not affirm that you were enrolled as a Stanford student in any way; it does not confer a Stanford grade; it does not confer Stanford credit; and it does not confer a Stanford degree or a certificate.
Stanford is not worried about those certificates. If it were worried in any way, it would prevent the use of it's materials or syllabi being used in the production of the courses and it wouldn't help to promote them.
His signature on a certificate for a course that has absolutely no controls is about as useless a piece of paper as I can imagine...except for possibly Microsoft Developer certifications.
Why on earth would Stanford care about a meaningless certificate?
He's not leaving teaching, he's just upping his class size a little.
http://www.cs101-class.org/hub.php All the links are on there.
He was already carrying out research for Google, so I imagine in a lot of ways, Stanford was his side project. Then this opportunity came along and he traded Stanford in for the opportunity to do something really big.
Don't they require you to attend an actual exam or to submit a significant piece of written work?
Neither of those methods of assessment can be accomplished over the internet for free. That is the biggest obstacle these free courses face if they wish to become a major part of the educational landscape.
Standard practice is to provide the audio of the video with an additional track providing any information that is not described within the original narration. Add in a full transcript to cover the deaf, ensure your site can be navigated by screen readers and you're golden.
Making a video course accessible to blind people is a significant task.
This has nothing to do with Sebastian Thrun. He had nothing to do with this batch of courses. Both schemes emerged from Stanford and launched alongside one another (presumably to maximise publicity), but they are not related.
There have been suggestions (from, most notably, Professor Jeffrey Ullman) that Stanford got spanked by disability advocates who complained that the courses were not accessible to the visually impaired and that the development team was working to get this fixed before launch; hence the delay.
As for certificates - it has always been made very clear that there would be no certification or credit of any kind, issued by Stanford for these courses or for the courses run by Sebastian Thrun's outfit. For there to be contention, there needs to be some area of disagreement - there is none.
But again, you assume for some reason that schools will do a better job of teaching programming than they do with everything else, when in fact, they are more likely to screw it up because the teachers can't program themselves. In UK Secondary education, only 35% of IT teachers are specialists. So over half of the teachers are as clueless as the kids they are teaching. What could possibly go wrong?
Teaching a subject badly makes kids hate something. Why do you think that they will do a better job of teaching programming than they do with Maths, Science, English etc?
You're in the UK and you can't find a programming job? What the hell do you code in? French?
Do we want a generation of kids to grow up despising programming and programmers? Look at what the education system does to English Literature, Maths and Science.
Kids grow up loathing Shakespeare because it isn't taught in the same context that it was written for. Kids grow up to hate maths because they've been force fed the mundane basics since they were 5. Do we honestly think they'll do a better job with programming?
I'm all for a more thorough coverage of Comp Sci and ICT - of which programming is obviously a part, but it should be weighted to play to the strengths and interests of the individual students. Some students will take to programming, others to graphics and animation, but as soon as you start making stuff compulsory, you find yourself forced to water down the content and you end up sucking the joy out of it.
Those of us with Comp Sci university backgrounds will probably remember how miserable those students who didn't 'get' programming were. Do we really want to do that to kids?
Just because people get away with it doesn't mean they're supposed to do it.
I actually think that the way the lecture videos were presented in the AI Class were superior to most conventional lectures. They were broken up in bitesize chunks of 2-10 minutes each, which meant that as soon as you started to lose focus, you just walk away, whether that be after 15 minutes or 2 hours. Also, if you found a topic confusing you could stop moving forward, read up on the topic yourself or consult your fellow students on the discussion boards (which were incredible) until you were happy with it, then continue on. And of course, you can watch them repeatedly.
Sure, there are shortcomings, but I think they more than held their own.
No. Thrun never had anything to do with the Stanford Engineering courses. They just started at the same time to maximise publicity.